A database is an organized collection of data, typically in digital form. As the size and complexity of database systems increase, database performance analysis plays a more and more important role. One way to analyze the performance of a database is to sample information for various activities in the database according to a sampling frequency. Thus, the time spent in the database on various types of activities can be estimated by multiplying the number of samples with the sampling frequency. However, an activity may include many separate short or long events. Many database users or developers have been trying to estimate the number of events based on the averaged sampled event times. Because the frequency based sampling method is extremely biased toward long events, the estimated event counts obtained by the above-mentioned method are often not reliable.
It is within this context that embodiments arise.